All versions aggregate around 200 services, but from version to version (usually updated every 2-3 years), the creators remove over 100 social media platforms and add another 100 in.

The world of social media is changing incredibly fast, so when you’re just starting out, start with the ones that have been around for years.

Betting on “the next big thing” can pay off, if you’re right. But, if you’re just getting started on a social media strategy, you can’t afford to miss having a Facebook page or a Twitter account, which are proven and well established.

Let’s look at some key social media terms.

Content: Content is whatever you are posting. It can be a Facebook status update, a photo on Instagram, a tweet, to pin something on a board on Pinterest, a video on Vine, etc.

The graphic already showed you that content comes in many different forms and it needs to be custom-tailored to each platform. What’s even more important than content though, is context.

And, the opposite is also true. Packaging your entire blog post into one tweet is hardly possible, so try a good call-to-action with some relevant hashtags instead. Speaking of which…

Hashtags: By now, they’re a very common form used to add meta information on almost all social media channels. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine and Pinterest all use hashtags to let you describe the topic of your content or mark them as part of current trends.

They make your content easily discoverable and, thus, more likely to be shared.

Share: The currency of the social media world. Shares are all that matters on social media. People will keep talking to you about impressions, click-through rates and potential reach. But, none of these tell you whether people actually pass on what you have to say.

When people engage and interact with your content, that’s good. But, when they share it, that is the time when you celebrate.

A great tool to measure shares and the overall impact of content is Buzzsumo:

The more shares, the more people love your content. It’s the best form of engagement that people can make with it.

Engagement: A general term meaning people interact with the content that you produce. It can be a like, a recommend, a comment or a share. All of these are good, but the shares are where it’s at.

Alright, time to look at the most popular platforms (and a few up and comers). For each platform, I’ll give you a short history of how it came about and where it’s at right now, what the context of the platform dictates and how to come up with great content for it.

Below is a table of contents, so you can quickly jump to whichever platform interests you the most.

Facebook

History: Like the movie name suggests, this is THE social network. Founded in a Boston dorm room in 2004 and originally only accessible to Harvard students, Mark Zuckerberg and his co-founders quickly realized the site’s potential.

After expanding to Ivy League colleges and a few more, they opened Facebook to everyone in 2006 and it completely exploded, as you saw above.

Now it’s the biggest social media platform out there. It offers marketers the most data and the most targeted ads. You can be as specific as defining your customer down to the socks she’s wearing.

With Facebook ads, you can target 45-54 year old management executives in the Bay area who play golf on a regular basis and regularly spend money on equipment (thanks to credit card data).

Context: Facebook gives you a lot of freedom when it comes to content. Images work, videos do and so do text posts. What matters, though, is that you integrate your content into the platform as much as possible.

Google+

It was Google’s counterattack to Facebook and even though it surely hasn’t dethroned the king, it’s done fairly well.

Out of 2.5 billion Gmail users, around 250 million have activated their Google+ account. However, only 25 million have ever posted on the platform and only 4-6 million are really active on it.

However, the advantage of Google+ is its seamless integration with Gmail. This is owed to the idea of circles, around which Google+ groups everything. When you add someone to your network, you can instantly mark them as a friend, colleague or family member

Google+ makes it really easy to connect with more people, as it recently started allowing you to add people back (in return for them adding you) right from your notification email.

One of Google’s most successful moves was integrating Google Hangouts, which plenty of people use to host webinars.

Context: Similar to Facebook, Google+ allows for a wide variety of posts, including images, videos and even polls.

Even if your main outlet is Facebook, cross posting to Google+ is an easy win, especially if your circles differ a bit from your Facebook fans.

Their growth was entirely organic. The app was so good, that it dominated the app store charts for months. And, it still does. The iPhone 4 had just come out, which meant a major leap forward in the quality of pictures taken with smartphones.

5 years and 400 million users later, the way the app works is almost entirely the same. People post pics, tag friends, insert hashtags and double tap to show they like what others share.

Context: Pictures. Instagram is and was always about pictures. Out of all of the big networks, Instagram has the highest engagement rate. Since liking is so easy (you just double tap on a picture, as you scroll through your feed), people tend to do it more than on Twitter or Facebook.

You can also release short 15 second videos on Instagram, but very few accounts do that successfully.

This guy, for some time, only posted videos on there, but the engagement was really low (under 10 likes with 11,000 followers).

When he posted pictures, people liked and commented a lot more. Proof that video on Instagram can work, though, is Ms. Dash.

Her videos routinely collect 3,000+ likes and hundreds of comments within a day of posting.

She has collected over 300,000 followers, because her videos are excellent. Each one shows you an entire recipe in 15 seconds.

But, if I was to start a new Instagram account from scratch, I’d focus entirely on pictures. Here are a few categories that work well:

Of course, you must also make use of hashtags, give a call-to-action with each photo and make sure that you’re using your bio right (it’s your only chance to link back to your site). But, more on that below.

You can also focus on Instagram influencer marketing, but that’s a subject for another day.

YouTube

Who knew it would blow up to 1 billion monthly usersin less than 10 years? This social network has changed the way we consume video, since it has made it easy (streaming is super fast), free and gives us a way to express our opinion instantly (thanks to comments).

About 200 million hours of videos are watched each month – that’s 22,000 years of time.

YouTube has spawned entire industries and kickstarted thousands of careers. 10 years ago, no one could make a living playing video games.

Thanks to YouTube, people can now build a nice small business teaching things, sharing make-up tutorials, doing funny pranks and sharing their athletic abilities (or lack thereof).

For marketers, it’s a great way to share long form content with your audience, especially if they’re not avid readers. For example, you could turn your blog posts into video tutorials.

Pro tip: Use other social media channels as a gateway to drive your followers to YouTube, by giving excerpts, snippets and previews of your videos, for example. The little bite sized teasers will spark curiosity and make people want to see the whole thing.

Context: There are two ways to succeed on YouTube. You can either entertain or teach.

If you’re trying to be funny, you should be funny on all channels, it doesn’t make sense for your brand with a blog about PPC advertising to suddenly make animal jokes on YouTube. You’d be better off teaching some of your strategies on video.

Don’t overthink this, as you don’t need high quality recording equipment or fancy editing. Chances are that you are a few steps ahead of most people in your niche, so just get in front of your webcam and start teaching.

They quickly increased that number to 50%, within 4 months (13,000 people more per month), whereas getting email invitations to increase from 4% to 7% (19,000 people more per month) took 2 years.

(they are very clear about what you should do)

What they always had going for them was being profitable very early. After only 3 years of being in business, thanks to premium subscriptions, a paid job board and a few other freemium options, they were making money.

Ultimately, a few key turning points, like allowing users to import contacts, focusing on the professional San Francisco tech scene and the acquisition and integration of great services, like Slideshare and Pulse, helped them grow to a 7,600 people company, traded publicly and valued at roughly 18 billion dollars (Until Microsoft paid more for them).

Context: On LinkedIn, it’s all about being professional. The casual writing style that’s used to make some blogs, including my own, so popular, doesn’t work as well on LinkedIn. People are there for one thing only: business.

They want to learn about what’s new in their industry, who’s hiring, who’s firing and how to optimize their performance at work.

A slideshare about baking muffins won’t do nearly as well as an in-depth company presentation from a tech conference.

If it helps people to expand their network or conduct business in a better way, your content has its place on LinkedIn. If not, you might want to focus on other channels first.

Reddit

Reddit is another college originated social media site and a very special one at that. Focused entirely on community benefit, Reddit’s users will ferociously attack you for spamming link bait or dumping promotional links on their boards, called subreddits.

Context: Reddit is tough to crack. You can’t use it as another distribution channel and just submit a link every time you press publish on your blog.

You have to be present, communicate and give value to fellow Redditors, without asking for anything first.

Submit funny and helpful links for a while, just to build up your karma, then refer back to your content, but only where appropriate. And, be sure to make the links a side note, rather than the entire content of the post.

Snapchat

History: I remember downloading this app, back in 2012, thinking: “This is stupid,” deleting it again and not hearing about it again until about 2 years later.

I still think it’s stupid, but 30% of America’s teens between 13 and 17 years old don’t. Snapchat has over 100 million daily active users. While the majority of those are girls (about 70%), the boys who share on the platform all have one thing in common: they’re all young.

70% of the users are under 25 years old. The hacks and spams and naked selfie scandals might easily distract the average adult from the fact that this is one serious platform for marketers.

Founded only a few years ago, in September 2011, the app is already valued at $10-20 billion dollars (depending on the source).

Context: If your products are targeting 14 year old girls and you’re not on Snapchat, you are doing something wrong. However, even if you’re on the platform, it’s easy to do a lot wrong.

Since all images and videos disappear after 10 seconds max, the context suggests that all content on the platform is fleeting and short-lived.

Naturally, it makes sense to provide content around that same theme.

For example, you could give your audience access to a live event. If you’re giving a talk at a conference, take a few snaps when you’re on stage and share them with your followers.

Context: Always, always, always remember that 85% of the audience are women. They collect, they curate and they share. Topics, like decorations, interior design, cooking and clothing do extremely well.

Pinterest is also one of the only platforms where images are best displayed vertically, due to the nature of the pin boards. Keep in mind that your pics need special formatting to look good on Pinterest.

Vine makes use of that by allowing their user videos to be only 6 seconds long. The platform was founded in June 2012 and acquired by Twitter for $30 million, before its official launch, only 5 months later.

Context: Remember how I said you can either teach or entertain on YouTube? On Vine, you can only entertain.

Even though there were a few successful campaigns in the “Ahhh, interesting” category, like the #6secondscience from GE, the incredibly short amount of time that you have to win people’s hearts is usually best spent on making them laugh.

Music is another option for success on Vine. If your brand teams up with an artist, you could release snippets of their work (or have them write a song for your campaign), to build awareness for your new product, for example.

Yik Yak isn’t monetizing the app, yet. But, given its size, there are bound to be opportunities for marketers fairly soon, so keep an eye on this one and you might get a chance at grabbing a piece of the first mover pie.

Founded in 2007 and acquired by Yahoo in 2013 – for $1 billion. Up until that point, they had collected about 1/10th of that in funding, around $125 million.

Now, over 50 million posts are created each day and the site makes money with advertising.

Context: The endless scroll feature makes Tumblr naturally good for images. It’s a very visual medium, often used by designers or photographers to display their portfolio.

Fashion brands and bloggers can use it tocurate content from their industry.

There’s one type of file however, where Tumblr is the clear number 1 in: GIFs.The animated, moving images are right in between photographs and videos.

While most people switch to Instagram for photos and videos don’t work well on Tumblr, since they interrupt your flow (you have to stop, press play, then pause the video again and scroll to the next one), GIFs are the cross pollination of the two.

Funny memes, animated clips and short video excerpts, make users scroll endlessly and binge-consume the content.

If you’re in fashion, design, photography or another visual industry, be sure to take a very serious look at Tumblr.

Medium

History: You’d think, by now, that there are enough blogging platforms out there. But nope, apparently not. Somehow, within 2 years, Medium grew into one of the largest blogging sites on the web, with an Alexa ranking of 578.

A big part of that is its sleek and simple design. Ev Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, initially launched it in a 2012 closed beta, before eventually opening it to the public.

Similar to some apps, like Hemingway, the user interface is incredibly simple. The difference is, users can press publish directly, instead of copying the content to their own blog.

Before Williams founded Medium, he also created Blogger, which he eventually sold to Google. Clearly, he has a knack for blogging platforms.

Thanks to having numerous big publications, Medium can be a way to build an entire audience, without ever creating your own website.

After raising $1.5 million in funding, the app company was acquired by Twitter, before it even launched, for $50-100 million. Twitter then, of course, made the launch much easier, helping the app garner 10 million users in 4 months, an insanely explosive growth rate.

Competitors launched around the same time, include Meerkat and Blab (the latter being for group chats).

Context: Since a Periscope is always a live event, it makes sense to either take your fans to a special, live event in your life (remember the behind the scenes videos that you can do with Snapchat?), or make the Periscope itself an event worth attending.

One way to do that is to give things away to commenters. Another is to solve a very specific problem your audience has, or to do a Q&A.

In order to get live viewers, though, you need to make sure that you promote the broadcast beforehand. For people to actually click through, you also need a great headline.

Then, by using relevant hashtags, tweeting it out a couple times before you go live and potentially promoting it on other channels, you can make sure that you get the first bunch of live viewers in, who can then share it with their followers to invite more people.

Beme

History: Just launched in Summer, 2015, by famous movie producer and YouTuber Casey Neistat, Beme wants to seriously disrupt social media.

In the release video, Neistat says that we usually only publish the most filtered, brushed up, perfect moments of our lives. Instead of sharing who we want to be, Beme is supposed to help us share who we really are.

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About Neil Patel

He is a New York Times best selling author. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.